Plague of the Manitou

By Graham Masterton

A self-proclaimed psychic investigates a deadly plague that creates talking corpses in this chilling horror novel by the author of Blind Panic.

Virus expert Anna Grey is disturbed when a dying patient is wheeled past her lab vomiting fountains of blood and screaming like a banshee. To make matters worse, when she examines the man’s corpse, she could swear she hears him whisper: “Get it out of me.” John Patrick Bridges is dead. He’s definitely dead. But if he’s dead—how is he talking?

Anna wonders if she’s going mad. But then a second man hemorrhages and dies; yet Anna hears him whisper, “Please help me.”

There is no such thing as demons, Anna tells herself. But cynical fortune-teller Harry Erskine knows otherwise, and a series of extremely disturbing events are forcing him from his Miami home towards the bereaved Anna, who does not yet know the evil she is facing . . .

Praise for Graham Masterton

“God, he’s good.” —Stephen King

“One of the most original and frightening storytellers of our time.” —Peter James

“Suspenseful and tension-filled. . . . All the finesse of a master storyteller.” —Guardian (UK)

“One of Britain’s finest horror writers.” —Daily Mail (UK)

“You are in for a hell of a ride.” —Grimdark Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780106588

Graham Masterton

Graham Masterton (born 1946, Edinburgh) is a British horror author. Originally editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, Graham Masterton's first novel The Manitou was published in 1976 and adapted for the film in 1978. Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar award by the Mystery Writers of America for Charnel House and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for Mirror. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel Family Portrait, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Masterton's novels often contain visceral sex and horror. In addition to his novels, Masterton has written a number of sex instruction books, including How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed and Wild Sex for New Lovers. Visit www.grahammasterton.co.uk

Book preview

ONE

Anna had heard men scream before, but never like this – a strangulated screech that went on and on for over ten seconds before it finally ended in a throaty gargle of despair. It sounded more like a dog being crushed inch by inch under a roadroller than a man in pain.

She lifted her head away from her Raman microscope and listened. She heard shouting and banging in the corridor outside the laboratory – then a complicated pattering of footsteps and the whirr of a gurney being propelled very fast along the polished vinyl floor.

The man screamed again as the gurney passed the laboratory door, and this time Anna could hear what he was screaming. ‘Get it out of me! Get it out of me!’

Another man’s voice said, ‘Jesus!’

She stood up, walked quickly across to the door and opened it. She was just in time to see the nurse and two hospital orderlies hurrying toward the elevators, rolling the gurney between them. The man who was lying on it was flailing his arms and jolting up and down as if he were being electrocuted. At the same time he was vomiting fountains of blood. It had drenched the front of his blue checkered shirt and spattered the nurse and the orderlies. It had even sprayed up the walls.

After they’d turned the corner at the end of the corridor, the man let out only one more scream, but Anna could hear the continuous clattering and creaking of the gurney as he kept on jolting up and down. Eventually, she heard the elevator chime, and then there was silence.

She stood in the laboratory doorway for a few moments, feeling both disturbed and puzzled. She had seen scores of patients hemorrhage before, and just as many suffering from violent seizures, but she couldn’t remember seeing a patient convulsing so violently while vomiting up so much arterial blood, and screaming at the same time.

She was about to go back into her laboratory when a man suddenly appeared around the corner. He stopped and came no nearer, but stayed at the far end of the corridor, staring at her.

He had cropped gray hair and a neat gray beard. His face was ashy-pale, and his eyes were deep-sunk, with charcoal-dark circles around them. He was wearing a gray knee-length coat with a Nehru collar and buttons all the way down the front, and altogether he was so colorless that he could have stepped out of a black-and-white photograph. He continued to stare at Anna as if he were trying to commit her face to memory. At first he looked thoughtful, but then, gradually, he began to grin at her, until he was baring his teeth. His lips were moving, although he was too far away for her to be able to hear if he was actually saying anything.

By the expression on his face, however, she felt that he was mouthing something lecherous like: I could have you, lady, any time I felt like it. As if to emphasize what she had imagined him to say, he licked his lips with the tip of his tongue.

Anna didn’t recognize him as one of the Saint Louis University hospital faculty, and she was about to call out, ‘Excuse me, sir!’ when he took a single step back and disappeared from sight.

She didn’t go after him. Hospital security wasn’t her problem, after all. But she was still standing there wondering who he might have been when her lab assistant Epiphany came click-clacking along the corridor carrying two Styrofoam cups of coffee. Epiphany was looking down with horror at the bloody footprints and wheel marks on the floor, and when she reached the doorway she said, ‘Holy moley, Anna! What in the name of heck …?’

‘I know. They just wheeled a patient past here, and he was bringing up blood by the bucketful. Convulsing, too, even worse than epilepsy. I mean, my God, he was bouncing up and down like he was on a trampoline.’

Epiphany held up the two cups of coffee. ‘Here. Sorry. They didn’t have no pecan sandies left. I didn’t know what you’d like instead.’

‘That’s OK, Epiphany. I don’t think I have too much of an appetite now.’

They went back into the laboratory, although Anna didn’t return to her work immediately. She felt unaccountably tense, as if the blood-spattering chariot-race that had just rushed past her door was only a portent of something much worse to come. It wasn’t unusual for her to feel like that. It was her job to be alarmist, after all. But the way that patient had been convulsing had triggered a memory of something she’d read about unusually violent seizures a long time ago, or something that some lecturer or some specialist had told her – especially since he had been shouting: ‘Get it out of me!’ It irritated her that she couldn’t remember what it was.

She had also been unsettled by the man in gray who had grinned at her so suggestively. What had he been doing there? And why had he been looking so pleased with himself?

‘Are you OK?’ Epiphany asked her, looking up from her laptop. ‘We have another nine batches of tests to run, don’t we?’

‘Sure. Yes. I don’t know. No, I’m not OK. That – that’s upset me.’

‘Hey, come on,’ said Epiphany, standing up. She came across to Anna and laid a hand on her shoulder. Both women were tall, but Epiphany was an inch or two taller, with cornrows decorated with multicolored beads. Anna had short-cropped, silver-blonde hair and high cheekbones, and she was very thin. Her mother had always said that she ought to have been a fashion model, but her father, Edward Grey, was a highly respected biochemist and she had never wanted to do anything else but follow him into medical science.

Her partner David had once told her, ‘That’s why I love you so much, Anna. You have Jonas Salk’s brain in Heidi Klum’s body.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she told Epiphany. ‘Just give me a moment.’

‘Maybe you’d feel better if you went up to surgery to see how the guy’s getting along,’ Epiphany suggested. ‘They must have been taking him into theater if he was barfing up blood like that.’

‘No, no. We need to start these tests right away. We’re running behind time as it is. We don’t want to see any more kids going down with this bug.’

Two days ago, Anna had been sent blood samples from twenty-seven children at Meramac Elementary School in Clayton after they had been struck without warning by a devastating illness. Five- and six-year-olds had been collapsing in the classrooms and the playground with acute flu-like symptoms – weakness, shivering, projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea. The school had temporarily been closed until Anna and her team could determine what kind of virus was causing it and come up with some effective treatment. At the moment, all of the affected children were being kept in isolation at Saint Louis Children’s Hospital.

‘You’re sure you’re OK?’ Epiphany repeated.

‘Please, Epiphany. I’m sure I’m sure. Let’s just get back to this virus. The more tests I’ve been running, the more it looks like some kind of avian flu mutation, like H5N1, but it’s much more virulent than H5N1.’

‘Well, it sure looks like bird flu, don’t it?’ said Epiphany. ‘It has pretty much the same symptoms as bird flu, too – even though it spreads about ten times faster and its symptoms are about ten times worse.’

Anna sipped her latte, which was still too hot, and then nodded in agreement. ‘It hasn’t responded to any of the usual antivirals, either. I’ve tried oseltamivir and zanamivir, but neither of those could stop it from escaping from its host cell. It replicates like rabbits on fire.’

‘Excuse me?’ said Epiphany. ‘Rabbits on fire?’

‘Well, you know what I mean. Rabbits on speed. Rabbits on Viagra. Rabbits behaving like rabbits. I’m too tired to be logical.’

She paused again. She still couldn’t erase the image of that gray bearded man – the way his lubricious grin had widened slowly across his face, as if it were being spread by a warm knife. There was no question in her mind that he had said something, and she wished that she could lip-read because in her mind’s eye she could still clearly see his lips moving, like watching a video loop, over and over again.

She took another sip of her latte, and then she lifted her surgical mask over her nose and mouth and sat down again in front of her microscope. When she adjusted the focus, the virus sample that had been taken from a critically ill five-year-old boy came sharply into view – clusters of bright green globules with sharp spines projecting from them, bobbing around like sea urchins.

As she started to take a series of 3-D images, her cellphone rang.

‘Anna?’ said a clipped voice. It was Jim Waso, the CEO. ‘How’s it going with the Meramac Elementary School virus samples?’

‘Very slow, sir,’ she told him. ‘In my opinion it’s almost certainly a variant of H5N1, but it’s highly complex. It’s strongly resistant to any of the antivirals I’ve used. I have a plan, though. I’m about to try tyranivir. I don’t think tyranivir is going to destroy it, but it could make it show its hand, if you get my meaning.’

‘OK,’ said Jim Waso. ‘But I’m sorry to tell you that I had a call five minutes ago from the Children’s Hospital. A six-year-old girl passed away about a half-hour ago – Deborah-Jane Crusoe, for your records. Respiratory failure. A five-year-old boy is so critical that they don’t believe he can survive the night.’

‘I’m doing everything I can here, Jim, believe me. Doctor Ahmet and Doctor Kelly will both be coming in later to give me some more back-up, and the NCIRD have just sent me all the latest updates on H5N1 variants – especially that outbreak they had last month in San Bernardino.’

‘Anna – I don’t have to tell you how critical this is. I have to make a media statement in twenty minutes, and I need to tell them something positive. We have a reputation to uphold here at SLU, and quite apart from that we don’t want to kick off some kind of city-wide panic.’

‘Like I say, Jim, I’m doing everything I can. By the way – before you hang up – an emergency patient was brought past my lab about ten minutes ago. He was convulsing and bringing up copious quantities of blood. Do you know anything about that?’

‘Nobody’s reported anything to me yet. I’ll have Gerda look into it, if you like. Any special reason?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Anna. ‘His symptoms were very unusual, that’s all. You know me. Always on the lookout for some condition that’s out of the ordinary.’

‘That’s almost a condition in itself, professor, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

There was a pause between them before they hung up. Even though he always spoke to her so sharply, Anna had sensed for quite a few months that Jim Waso found her attractive. Maybe that was why he spoke to her so sharply, to conceal how he felt. She would have found him attractive, too, if she hadn’t already been committed to David.

She heard a clatter outside in the corridor and a woman singing some Rihanna song off-key: ‘You’re beautiful, like diamonds in the sky …’ It sounded as if the cleaning crew were mopping up the blood already. She pulled up her surgical mask, ready to return to her microscope, but as she did so, she caught a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye. She turned toward the door just in time to see the gray-bearded man staring in at her through the porthole window. At once, he vanished.

Anna went across to the door and opened it. Outside, two cleaners with yellow plastic buckets and a mobile cleaning trolley were sponging off the last streaks and speckles of blood from the walls and mopping the floor with EnvirOx.

Anna looked in both directions, but the man in gray was nowhere to be seen. Either she had imagined him looking in through the window, or he was a very fast walker.

‘Did either of you see a man standing here a moment ago?’ she asked one of the cleaners. ‘Gray hair, gray coat, bearded?’

‘Ain’t seen nobody, ma’am. Sorry. Did you see somebody, Shirelle?’

‘Not a soul, honey. But then I ain’t got my new eyeglasses yet. I can’t see squat.’

Anna slowly closed the lab door. As she crossed back to her workstation, her phone warbled again. This time it was Bernie Fishman, deputy head of surgery. His voice was a deep, rich baritone, as if at any moment he was going to start singing Nessun Dorma.

‘Anna, I wonder if you could spare us a moment? I understand from Jim Waso that you were showing an interest in one of our latest admissions.’

‘You mean the guy who was bringing up blood and convulsing?’

‘That’s the very one.’

‘How is he? Have you managed to control his seizures? How about the hemorrhage?’

‘He didn’t make it, Anna. He passed away about ten minutes ago. But why don’t you come take a look at him? To tell you the truth, I’d really value your opinion.’

‘I’m up to my ears here, Bernie.’

‘I know that. But it won’t take you more than five or ten minutes. And you should see him for yourself. He’s deceased, but to look at him, you’d think that he still has the Devil breathing down his neck.’

TWO

Bernie Fishman was waiting for her when she stepped out of the elevator on the second floor, the emergency department. Not only did he sound like a baritone, he also looked like a baritone, with a round face and double chin and a bald suntanned crown with a halo of wild black hair around it. His chest was deep, but his legs were short, and he walked very nimbly, as if he were strutting across the stage at La Scala.

‘Anna,’ he greeted her. ‘How are you, beautiful lady? I haven’t seen you for ever.’

‘You saw me last Wednesday, Bernie, at the Stroke Network fund-raiser. You bought me a glass of Prosecco.’

‘Yes, feh! But it was much too crowded. We couldn’t talk together tête-à-tête.’

‘Bernie, your tête is at least six inches lower than my tête. We can never talk tête-à-tête.’

‘God, you’re so cruel to me.’

They walked along the corridor to the emergency surgery theaters. Bernie pushed open the door of Recovery Room Three and said, ‘Here’s our boy.’

In the center of the room stood a gurney covered with a pale-green sheet. The door swung shut behind them, and when it did the room was utterly silent, smelling faintly of disinfectant and cinnamon, like stale incense. Bernie went over to the cupboards on the left-hand side and handed Anna a mask.

‘The patient’s name is John Patrick Bridges. He admitted himself to the ER at ten oh-five complaining of a blinding headache and nausea. He was sitting in the waiting room when without warning he started to shout and scream. He dropped on to the floor in a fit, frothing at the mouth, and then he started to hemorrhage.’

‘I saw him when they wheeled him past my lab,’ said Anna. ‘I just couldn’t believe those convulsions.’

‘Well, right. Even after he was anesthetized, we had to strap him to the operating table to immobilize him, and that took three of us.’

‘What about the bleeding?’

‘We tried to stop it, but it was coming from everywhere, like every blood vessel in his esophagus and his stomach had burst. He was losing blood faster than we could pump it into him, and in the end he was over three liters down and there was nothing we could do to save him. We’re going to carry out a full autopsy, of course, but I thought you’d be interested because he was showing symptoms of some infection. In particular, his body temperature was way up – his last anal reading before he passed away was forty point three degrees.’

‘Jesus. He was practically broiling himself alive.’

Bernie circled around the gurney, took hold of the sheet and started to lift it. ‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked her.

Anna shrugged. ‘I won’t know until I’ve seen it.’

Bernie drew the sheet down as far as the man’s bare chest. It was obvious why he had told Anna that the man looked as if the Devil was still on his tail. His brown eyes were bulging and his whole face was contorted, with his mouth dragged so far downward that it gave him the appearance of a medieval gargoyle.

Anna approached the gurney and looked at the man more closely. He was brown-haired, about thirty-five years old, with designer stubble from which all of the blood had not yet been cleaned.

From the look of his upper body, he appeared to be reasonably fit, and he had a natural tan which was beginning to fade, as if he had been on vacation for the early part of the summer, but since then had been spending his days indoors.

She pulled the sheet down further. The man had a slight paunch, which may have been the result of alcoholism, but it wasn’t the grossly swollen stomach that results from ascites, when fluid is retained in the abdomen because of a terminally damaged liver.

‘We gave him a preliminary once-over, after death,’ said Bernie. ‘There’s no external trauma, not even bruising.’

‘OK,’ said Anna. Even when she was examining the rest of his body, she couldn’t stop herself from repeatedly glancing back at his face. ‘I never saw anyone look like that, immediately post-death,’ she said. ‘All our muscles relax when we die, before rigor sets in. How can his face have possibly stayed so rigid?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Bernie. ‘That’s one of the reasons I wanted you to come take a look at him. Is there any disease which causes your facial muscles to lock up like that?’

‘Well, there’s Lyme disease, isn’t there? That can cause psychosis as well as rigidity, which could account for him looking so scared.’

‘Yes, but in Lyme disease the joints usually stiffen up, don’t they, almost like arthritis, so it’s unlikely that he would have been able to kick his legs and wave his arms around the way he was.’

Anna stood looking at the man’s face for a long time. She had never come across anybody with such a frightened expression on their face, dead or alive. Most victims of violent killings that she had seen had nothing more on their faces than mild surprise, and people who died naturally usually looked politely bored, as if somebody were telling them a long and tedious anecdote but they didn’t have the heart to interrupt them.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think it’s Lyme disease. But I’d like to take a few blood samples, if that’s OK, and maybe some urine and stool samples, too. What do we know about him?’

‘According to the ID we found in his wallet, he works for the city as a grants administrator. Well, he did. The police are informing his nearest and dearest even as we speak.’

‘Was he married? Single? In some kind of relationship? Where did he live?’

‘He had a gold ring on the third finger of his left hand, if that means anything. These days, who knows? He lived in Maplewood, which is a pretty respectable neighborhood, but then again, who can tell?’

At that moment, the door to the recovery room opened and a gingery-haired young secretary poked her head around it. ‘Doctor Fishman? There’s a call for you. It’s Mrs Fishman. Something about your pool filter?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Bernie. ‘Sorry, Anna – I really have to take this. My pool guy, he’s such a schlepper.’ He bustled out and left Anna alone with the late John Patrick Bridges.

Anna pulled out her cellphone and took six or seven photographs of his face from all angles, and then pulled the sheet down to his ankles and took some more pictures of his naked body.

She checked her watch. As fascinating as this was, she needed to get back to her laboratory. She drew the sheet back up to cover the body, but as she was about to lower it over his face a soft voice whispered, ‘Save me.’

Anna froze. She felt as if somebody were running an ice-cold fingertip all the way down her spine. She looked closely at the body’s face, and she could swear that those bulging brown eyes were staring at her now, instead of the ceiling. The mouth was still dragged downward and there was no sign that his facial muscles had relaxed, and yet she was sure she could see something more than terror in his expression.

He looked as if he were appealing to her to save him from whatever it was that was frightening him so much. I’m really, really scared. Save me.

Anna slowly stood up straight, although she folded the sheet back so that it didn’t drop over the body’s face.

‘Save me,’ the voice repeated. She couldn’t see the body’s lips move, but there was no doubt in her mind now that his eyes had turned toward her. ‘Get it out of me. Save me.’

She didn’t know whether to answer or not. John Patrick Bridges was dead, or at least he was supposed to be dead. If he had lost as much blood as Bernie Fishman had said he had, then he must be dead. If a human being lost only two-and-a-quarter liters of blood out of a total of five liters, without an immediate transfusion they would die.

As unnerved as she was, Anna thought: If by some miracle this man is still alive, then he’s going to need emergency treatment, and fast.

Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she reached out and placed her index finger and third finger against the carotid artery in his neck. Nothing. He had already lost most of his body heat, and there was no pulse at all.

Next, she lifted his arm and felt his wrist. Again, there was nothing.

‘You’re dead,’ she said, out loud. The recovery room was so silent that her own voice made her look around, as if the words had been spoken by a ventriloquist who was standing close behind her.

At that moment, Bernie Fishman pushed his way in through the door, shaking his head. ‘What a klutz! He burned out the goddamned pump, and now it’s going to cost me six hundred bucks to replace it!’ He stopped, and saw the expression on Anna’s face, and said, ‘What? What’s happened? You look like you just saw a dybbuk!’

Anna hesitated for a moment. It was more than likely that she’d imagined John Patrick Bridges speaking to her. She was very tired and very stressed, after all. She had slept only two-and-a-half hours last night before coming back to the hospital early to carry out more tests on the Meramac School virus.

‘It’s nothing.’ But then she said, ‘Look at his eyes, Bernie.’

‘What?’

‘The deceased. Look at his eyes.’

Bernie went across and peered at the body intently. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘What about his eyes?’

‘Before, he was looking straight up at the ceiling. Now he’s looking over here, toward me.’

‘He’s dead, Anna. Maybe his muscle links are starting to tighten. Watch!’ Bernie waved his hand in front of the body’s face, but John Patrick Bridges didn’t blink. ‘He’s dead, Anna. He’s nifter. He’s gone off to join el coro invisible.’

Anna hesitated for a long moment, and then she said, ‘Bernie, he spoke to me.’

Long silence. Above his surgical mask, Bernie’s eyes roamed around the room as if he had heard a blowfly buzzing around and was trying to see where it was.

‘He spoke to you.’

‘I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. It was only a whisper, but I’m sure he said, "Save me, and then he said, Get it out of me. And then he said, Save me," again.’

‘He’s dead, Anna. He’s kaput. You’ve been working too hard, that’s all.’

‘Bernie—’

‘He’s dead, Anna. Dead men don’t speak. Sometimes they belch, for sure. Sometimes they break wind. But speak – never. They never so much as whisper.’

‘Yes, well, I guess you’re probably right. I should get back to my lab. Jim Waso is screaming for results.’

Bernie covered the body’s face with the sheet, and then he went over to open the recovery room door. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee before you go back. You look like you could use a break.’

They sat in the hospital commissary by the window. Outside, there was a small brick-paved courtyard with bay trees in tubs, and if they craned their necks up to the sixth floor they could see a pentangle of bright blue sky, with streaky clouds in it. Anna realized that she hadn’t been out in daylight for almost a week now. She had gone to work in the dark and gone home in the dark. David had been away at a business convention in Chicago for the past three days, so there had been no incentive for her to finish early in the evenings, and she hadn’t been eating properly, only take-out salads at lunchtime and pizzas at night.

She didn’t really feel like another coffee, but Bernie always cheered her up and she recognized that he was right: she did need a few minutes to relax and sort out her thoughts. She was constantly telling Epiphany not to get too stressed, and yet she always pushed herself right to the very limit. She could never get it out of her mind that whenever she was taking time off, relaxing, some mutant virus might be silently spreading across the city and scores of people might get sick, or die. In the course of her career she had probably saved tens of thousands of lives. Her most significant success had been to find a treatment for a highly aggressive virus which had caused over two hundred fatalities last spring in Indiana and parts of Illinois. The media had called it Scalping Disease because one of its effects had been to make the sufferers’ hair fall out and leave their heads raw, as if they had been scalped. After two months of painstaking research, Anna had isolated the virus and formulated a highly effective vaccine.

In spite of everything that she had achieved up to date, she still didn’t believe that gave her any excuse to slacken. Even while she lay in bed asleep, viruses were changing and adapting and learning how to become more resistant to antivirals and antibiotics – a dark, heartless, nearly invisible army that never slept.

‘You remember Bill Kober?’ said Bernie, pouring four wraps of sugar into his cappuccino and noisily stirring it. ‘Well, of course you remember him. Talented – inspired, even, almost a genius, but seriously wacky. Do you know what he did when he left here?’

‘He went to India, didn’t he?’

‘That’s right. He carried out tests on the neurotoxins given off by chemical plants and how they affected the health of the local population. He wrote a report about it for the Journal of Medical Toxicology, and talk about damning.’

‘So what about him?’

‘Well – the Indian government went ape-shit when Bill reported that hundreds of kids were being poisoned by industrial pollution. They canceled his visa and told him to take a hike. So believe it or not, he went to Haiti after that, to find out if zombies were really true.’

‘You’re not trying to tell me that our nifter upstairs is a zombie?’

Bernie said, ‘No, of course not. Absolutely the opposite. When Bill looked into all the so-called evidence of zombies, he found that the prevailing wisdom was that people could be put into a deathlike trance with a combination of tetrodotoxin – TTX – and datura.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard that.’

‘The thing is, Bill tested these drugs and found that this simply wouldn’t happen. As you know, TTX selectively affects the sodium channels in the nerve cell membranes and the two drugs between them can give the appearance of death. But either they kill you for real or else you gradually recover and return to your normal self – or nearly normal, anyhow, maybe a little jingly in the brainbox for a while. Let me put it this way – what you won’t do is to go shuffling around shopping malls looking for unsuspecting people to eat, and you won’t lie on a gurney after flatlining for fifteen minutes and say, "Save me."’

‘All right,’ said Anna. ‘So you’re telling me that I simply imagined him talking to me, and that I need a rest?’

‘When was the last time you took a vacation?’

‘Two years ago. Yes, that’s right – we went to stay with David’s parents in Boise.’

‘You call that a vacation? Staying with anybody’s parents is a punishment. Staying with their parents in Boise – that’s much more than a punishment. That’s a penance. It would be more fun to flagellate yourself with razor-wire.’

Anna took hold of Bernie’s hand across the Formica-topped table. ‘Bernie, if you weren’t twenty years older and six inches shorter than me, and if you weren’t married and I wasn’t already spoken for, I’d marry you tomorrow.’

Bernie put on a mock-tragic face. ‘That’s just my luck. Born at the wrong fucking time, grew to the wrong fucking height. Todah elohim.’

‘I’ll send Epiphany up to take some samples. Thanks for the coffee, Bernie – and, you know, just thanks.’

THREE

It was past eight p.m. when she eventually made it home. She parked her silver Toyota Prius in the parking structure and walked across the pedestrian bridge to the Old Post Office building where she and David shared a loft. As she opened the door, she heard thunder overhead. She hoped that it would rain tonight, to relieve some of the oppressive August heat.

The loft was spacious and modern, with high ceilings and shiny oak floors covered with red-and-black Navajo rugs. Facing each other in the center of the living area were two large white leather couches with a glass-topped coffee table in between them, on which a ceramic statuette of a harlequin was dancing next to neatly stacked copies of Architectural Digest. On the walls hung three large nudes by Linda LeKinff and a bright, simplistic landscape in primary colors by Eric Bodtker.

She was surprised and disappointed to find that David wasn’t back yet. His convention had wrapped up last night with a final presentation and a celebratory banquet, and he had expected to be home by mid-afternoon at the latest. She had called him three times from the hospital, but every time his cellphone had been switched off, so she’d presumed that he was still in the air. She called him again, now, but his cell was still switched off.

‘Where are you?’ she said to his message service. ‘If you’ve found yourself a go-go girl, at least have the decency to call and tell me.’

She went through to the bedroom, kicked off her shoes and sat down on the bed to tug off her skintight jeans and unbutton her blouse. Wrapping herself in her peach silk robe, she went back through to the kitchen area, opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of Zinfandel. She opened the door of

Reviews for Plague of the Manitou

[nickhowes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Graham Masterton's latest entry in the saga of the vengeful long-dead Indian medicine man Misquemachus continues as Harry Erskine finds himself involved in an untamable plague sweeping the country. It's solution, he knows, will not come from medical laboratories but somehow from the supernatural. Masterton tells a tight, twisty tale of horror that keeps the reader glued to the page first to last. Harry this time faces a seemingly insurmountable problem...solving it amidst the death and destruction is a challenge that I found pretty irresistible.